The killing spree in Alabama fits a well-worn pattern of workplace-driven massacres that we’ve seen since the “going postal” phenomenon exploded in the middle of the Reagan revolution.

In spite of the fact that these killings have gone on unabated for over 20 years, most of the country doesn’t want to know why they’re happening — least of all the people in power.

If we study the motive for Michael McLendon’s shooting rampage Tuesday, which left 11 bodies across three towns in southern Alabama, and we look at the bizarre way that the causes of the shooting are being hushed up, you begin to understand why this uniquely-Reaganomics-inspired crime started in the United States, and continues to plague us.

But of all the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the murder spree, one of the oddest has to be the way Alabama authorities went from focusing hard on solving the shooter’s motive to suddenly dropping the issue like a hot potato and running away from the scene of the crime, as if they didn’t like what their investigation produced.

On Wednesday night, investigators announced that they had discovered the motive, and they would reveal it to the world on Thursday morning.

Investigators close in on motive of Alabama gunman by Donna Francavilla SAMSON, Ala. (AFP) — Alabama investigators said they were closing in on a motive for the U.S. state’s deadliest-ever shooting, in which a man killed his mother, grandmother and eight others before taking his own life. The Alabama Bureau of Investigations said there had been “very recent developments that we believe may direct us to a motive” for the grisly rampage, but ABI was quick to dismiss earlier reports that a hit list had been found in the house of the gunman, identified as Michael McLendon.

But then something funny happened on Thursday. Alabama investigators completely reversed themselves: They were now claiming there was no way to find out the motive for the killings, and in fact, no motive ever existed in the first place.

“There’s probably never going to be a motive,” Trooper Kevin Cook, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, said Thursday.

Even the list that provided so many obvious clues as to what sparked the shooting is now no longer the “hit list” or list of people who had “done him wrong,” but rather, “the kind of list you’d put on a magnet on the refrigerator door,” according to Cook.

Which is odd, because just the day before, Cook told reporters, “As to motive, what we do know is that his mother had a lawsuit pending against Pilgrim’s Pride.”

Why the bizarre about-face? We may never know, because Alabama investigators abruptly closed the investigation at noon on Thursday, sending home almost the entire team. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving along.

This raises a new question: What was it about McLendon’s motive that officials wanted hushed? Or better yet: What did Pilgrim’s Pride do that could have incited a man described by all as nice, quiet and respectful to unleash a bloody killing spree?

On the surface, the horrific details seem to suggest a straightforward case of a lone psychopath unleashed: Michael McLendon, 28, shot and killed execution-style his own mother and four dogs, then set their bodies on fire before driving to other relatives’ houses and killing them; he killed a deputy’s wife and baby, along with bystanders; and like so many rampage massacres over the past 20 years, he ended his life inside of his former workplace: Reliance Metal Products, in the small town of Geneva, Ala.

Authorities say they discovered a list — presumably a hit list — of people and companies whom McLendon felt had done him wrong. Popular culture tells us that the hit list and his grievances are themselves signs that he suffered from a persecution complex, like so many Charles Mansons. No need to actually look into who was on that hit list and why — the mere discovery of such a list should be enough to indict him, case closed.

But nothing’s solved, nothing’s closed; and if we’re serious about understanding the “why” of this massacre, as everyone claims to be, then that list is the best place to start.

As with so many of these rage massacres from the past 20 years, the more you look at Tuesdays’ killing spree, the more you see that the system we’ve been living under since Reaganomics conquered everything has created all kinds of monsters and maniacs, from the plutocrats who’ve plundered this country for three decades straight, down to the lone broken worker — McLendon — who took up arms in a desperate suicide mission against the beast that crushed him.

Michael “Doughboy” McLendon

So far we’ve learned that McLendon’s hit list names the three companies he had worked for since 2003 — Reliance Metals, which makes construction materials; Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s number one poultry producer, where his mother also worked, until she was suspended from her job last week; and Kelley Foods, a smaller family-owned meat-processing company from which McLendon apparently quit just last week.

Even more striking to someone who has studied these workplace massacres, it appears that McLendon was bullied and abused at work. One clue as to why he’d end his spree at Reliance, where he hadn’t worked since 2003, could be that he was trying to kill the source of the pain: workers at Reliance used to taunt him incessantly, giving him the nickname “Doughboy.” Which basically means “fatso” and “faggot” combined: McLendon was 5 feet, 8 inches tall, but he weighed roughly 210 pounds.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but “Doughboy” is the exact same nickname that workers at Standard Gravure, a printing plant in Louisville, Ky., gave to a guy named Joe Wesbecker back in the 1980s.

Like McLendon’s case against Pilgrim’s Pride, Wesbecker also was locked in an ongoing labor dispute with his company, whose top shareholders had gone on an eight-year plundering spree, leaving little for the workers; the government backed Wesbecker’s case against Standard Gravure, and he “won” his dispute, but it was irrelevant.

By 1989, the culture had changed, all power went to the CEOs and major shareholders. Standard Gravure’s senior executives ignored the arbitration rulings and continued to treat Wesbecker however they felt, slashing his pay under a different pretense, which would require a whole new round of arbitrations.

Joe “Doughboy” Wesbecker finally cracked: on Sept. 14, 1989, he unleashed America’s first private workplace massacre, pitting aggrieved worker against vampiric company, borrowing from the numerous post office shootings that had erupted a few years earlier. The result: seven killed, 20 wounded, and the death of the company that drove him to the brink. And an unending string of workplace massacres by “disgruntled employees” ever since.

Next time any asshole calls a kid or a co-worker “Doughboy,” put the bully and the bullied on the top of your next Ghoul Pool list. Bullying in the workplace, like bullying in the schoolyard, is only now being recognized as a serious problem, with devastating psychological consequences — and the occasional rampage massacre.

Conventional wisdom used to say that victims of bullying should “deal with it” since it was “just the way things are”; nowadays, after all the workplace and school shootings, anti-bullying laws and codes are becoming increasingly common.

But let’s go back to Pilgrim’s Pride, the company that the Alabama investigator first named as the possible motive for the massacre. You might have heard of Pilgrim’s Pride before, not only because you’ve bought their chicken, but because of the notorious undercover video shot in one of the company’s chicken slaughterhouses in 2004.

When you look back at that video, and you place future-rampage-killer McLendon and his mother in that environment, the gory, sadistic details take on new meaning:

PETA says its investigator witnessed workers “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.” In one shot, workers jump on live chickens with their entire body weight, sending blood and innards splashing on the lens of the hidden camera.

Mostly, the workers appear to have been acting either out of sheer boredom with their jobs or out of anger with management, sometimes for making them work too many hours. One sequence filmed on 6 April this year [2004], shows workers amusing themselves by throwing 114 birds against a wall, their stunned bodies collecting beneath it. At one point, a supervisor walks past and shouts “Hold your fire” so he can safely pass. Once out of the way, he tells the workers to “carry on.”

So this is the vicious world that McLendon spent some two years working in, and his mother far longer. The way the company treats its chickens is a good metaphor for how Pilgrim’s Pride treats its workers, shareholders and American taxpayers.

In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride, then the second-largest chicken processor in the world, made a huge gamble that will seem familiar to anyone who’s been following the financial crash: the company borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars, leveraging itself well beyond its means, in order to acquire a rival company and become the nation’s No. 1 chicken processor, slaughtering 45 million chickens per week.

That might have given the executives a nice, big hard-on, but it also meant they would have to come up with more money to pay for all that debt. So the company did do what every post-Reagan company has done and gotten away with: They made the workforce pay for the executives’ mistakes. That meant squeezing them for more work for less pay, or in Pilgrim’s case, more work for no pay: In August 2007, the U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against Pilgrim’s Pride accusing them of grossly undercompensating their employees. That same year, 10,000 Pilgrim’s Pride employees launched a class-action lawsuit demanding compensation for their work.

And this is where McLendon comes in: In 2006, the year of the acquisition, McLendon and his mother filed lawsuits and claims against the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Enterprise, Ala., charging the company with illegally denying them pay for the time it takes for workers to get suited up for the dangerous factory lines, and the time to take the protective gear off. Pilgrim’s Pride had decided to stop classifying that time at the job as “work,” now that they had a bunch of Wall Street bondholders to pay off. Other lawsuits also allege that the company forced workers to work overtime but only paid them regular hourly wages.

While all of this “cost-cutting” was ravaging thousands of workers at the bottom of Pilgrim’s wage pyramid, at the very top, things were very different for chairman Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim and his little pack of plundering wolves.

Despite the chairman’s disastrous acquisition, which eventually brought the company to bankruptcy in December 2008, and despite slashing the workforce’s already-low pay, Pilgrim rewarded himself handsomely for a job well done: in 2007, Bo Pilgrim paid himself $3.2 million and $2.1 million in 2008 for his work as “senior chairman” of the board. Pilgrim’s Pride also paid Bo $1.01 million for a contract with another firm he owns, meaning he signed on both dotted lines of the contract — a clear conflict of interest that is now the subject of a shareholder-fraud lawsuit.

There’s more: In 2008, Bo Pilgrim directed Pilgrim’s Pride to pay an egg-production facility that Bo owns $775,000 in rental fees; Bo’s son, Ken Pilgrim, was paid over a half-million dollars in both 2007 and 2008 as “co-chairman” of the board; another son, Pat Pilgrim, and a daughter, Greta Pilgrim-Owens, were paid a total of over a million dollars in 2007-08 by the Pilgrim-controlled board, and little Pat Pilgrim seems to have learned a thing or two from his father, earning himself an extra half a million dollars thanks to sweet contracts between Pilgrim’s Pride and his other company.

The only reason we know about all of this corporate malfeasance — so typical in the post-Reagan economy — is because of a shareholder lawsuit filed last year. Indeed, the trajectory of Pilgrim’s wealth-plunder is a microcosm of what went on all across corporate America: first Bo Pilgrim squeezed all he could out of the workforce, and when they were squeezed dry, he fleeced his own shareholders, the unter-plutocrats, before finally crying “bankruptcy” and turning to the American government and legal system to protect him and his loot.

Thanks to the “voluntary bankruptcy,” Pilgrim’s Pride is in a much better position against all the lawsuits against it. In fact, it’s in such a good position that the bankruptcy court even allowed Pilgrim family members to be hired back as restructuring “consultants,” on company pay. And in case they were having revenue problems to pay Bo, Ken, Pat and the other vampires, the USDA handed Pilgrim’s a contract worth tens of millions of dollars in January.

How did Pilgrim’s pay back the taxpayers for this little bailout? If you’ve read the news, you’ll know the answer: A few weeks later, Pilgrim’s Pride announced mass layoffs at three plants, devastating those communities. Local reports in rural American communities complain of huge tax bills owed by Pilgrim’s Pride left unpaid now that they’re protected by the bankruptcy, multiplying again the number of ways that the Pilgrim clan are fucking rural America:

Suwannee County could be out about $2 million if Pilgrim’s Pride doesn’t pay its property tax bill, according to Property Appraiser Lamar Jenkins.

The biggest taxpayer in the county filed for bankruptcy protection Dec. 1. Now it’s not clear when – or if – the bill will be paid.

“It’s certainly going to put a hurt on the budget of the county,” Jenkins told the Democrat by phone Thursday.

Jenkins said the unpaid bill represents 7.4 percent of the money local schools get from property taxes; 5.3 percent of county funds from that source; and 8 percent of the money the Suwannee River Water Management District receives from local property tax revenues.

A spokesman for Pilgrim’s did not respond to a request for comment.

If you’re wondering what the Reaganomics concept of “wealth transfer from the employee class to the plutocrat class” looks like, this is it. Multiply this story by just about every corporation out there today, and there you have America.

One major difference between the Europe’s and America’s school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they’re still incredibly rare in Europe — two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe’s schools.

That’s what makes America’s modern-day school shootings so unique — they happen so frequently and predictably (and for every shooting you hear about, there are dozens of averted shootings, shooting plots, kids caught with hit lists and duffel bags, etc., much of it covered up because they’re minors). This was exactly what the most famous school shooters, Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, hoped for when they attacked their school: “We need to fucking kick-start a revolution here! We need to get a chain reaction going!”

But whereas they’ve found a huge cult following among American kids devastated by a culture that coddles the bullies, pushes them to the limits to compete and succeed, and pumps them full of prescription drugs because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace — outside of America, Columbine’s influence has been sparse, as a culture like Germany’s is different from ours on so many levels.

For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where “people who can’t do teach,” while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights — like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).

The difference between a common maniac’s murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac’s killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don’t seem to be anything like what we have here.

Which brings me back to McLendon. Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended his mother, 52-year-old Lisa McLendon, from her job. Pilgrim’s Pride won’t say exactly why they suspended her from her night shift, except to darkly note it was a “very serious matter.” So serious, in fact, that they told her she could come back to work in a week if she “resolved” the matter to their satisfaction.

So again, what was she suspended for? This is where the corporate sadism gets surreal: According to one report, she was suspended for overstating her work hours on her time card. In other words, given her lawsuit (now no longer such a threat to Pilgrim’s while it is “restructuring” under American courts), she very likely decided she couldn’t wait for the courts anymore and decided to clock in her time spent putting on and taking off the required protective gear.

Suspending her in such a case would be a classic example of illegal corporate retribution against a worker with a labor dispute — but what can a small-town Alabama hick do, with so little money and only so much resources, against a many-headed corporate beast like Pilgrim’s Pride? The fact that Michael McLendon had the names of so many lawyers written down on lists in a spiral notebook shows that he tried going the legal route, but I mean, really, who’s fooling whom? You think a small-town Alabama chicken-plucker has a chance in hell of fighting these oligarchs in the courts?

“What has been difficult for these workers, both because of the raids and that there’s been a lot of press about layoffs at Pilgrim’s Pride, a lot of workers are afraid of retaliation for coming forward, afraid of losing their jobs,” [Jenny Yang] said. “We are trying to make sure people are aware federal laws protect them against retaliation for participating in the case.”

But anyone who understands company-labor relations since Reagan knows that companies routinely flout these laws and retaliate at will, suffering at worst a minor slap on the wrist, usually getting away with it completely.

Now that the company is under bankruptcy protection, with the same Pilgrims running the show, what’s the worst that would happen for punishing a lowly worker who made a claim? Another lawsuit? Yeah, right.

So now we can start looking at the “motive” that Alabama investigators first broke, then hushed up: Last week, Pilgrim’s Pride suspended McLendon’s 52-year-old mother from her grim night-shift job as retribution for her demands to be paid in full for her work. Almost the same time that his mother was suspended from Pilgrim’s Pride, McLendon abruptly quit his job at Kelley Foods, a meat-processing company a few towns over. Add to this another corporate attack on the locals: In mid-February, Reliance Metal Products, the place where McLendon worked until 2003 and where he ended his killing spree, quietly started laying off its workers and pushing the lucky few who still had jobs into working longer hours.

You can glean some of the anger and frustration in unofficial forums, but there’s little information in the official realm: According to a report dated Feb. 18 from a local TV station, WTVY:

Local Prefabricated Metal Manufacturer Lays Off Worker

At one time, Reliable Corp., based in Geneva, Ala., employed 800. We’re being told by those who work there that fellow employees have been receiving their lay-off notices. Reliable Corp. has been manufacturing prefabricated metal products for more than 50 years. Over recent days, News 4 has received several calls from those who’ve been laid off.

They haven’t been told if it’s temporary or if it’s a permanent job loss. In one correspondence, we’ve learned that those who’ve been laid off will meet with a delegation of company and state officials early next month in Geneva. Following the loss of a body-armor company late last year, Geneva Mayor Wynnton Melton says any loss of jobs for his city is tragic.

News 4 was unsuccessful in getting a statement from reliable officials in Geneva. In the 1990s, Geneva lost more than 2,000 textile jobs as they went to overseas’ countries. At this time, we’re not being told if the layoffs are due to the national recession. We will continue to follow this story as details become available.

As the local news crew reported, it’s almost impossible to find out any news about the layoffs because Reliable was keeping quiet. You get some clues to the answer via the three lonely comments at the bottom of the WTVY story:

Posted by: Rudy Location: New York on Feb. 18, 2009 at 4:28 p.m. — My heart goes out to the layoff victims of Reliable Corp. I found immediate advice and strategies in an iTunes app called “Pink Slip.” It helped me know my rights and keep my head during and after the meeting with HR.

Posted by: Gwynn Location: Westville on Feb. 18, 2009 at 7:56 a.m. — I have been laid off from Reliable. I have not been informed of any meetings. We were told that the layoffs were due to lack of work and that if work picked up, we would be called back to work. If work orders didn’t, we would be terminated at the end of the month.

Posted by: RELIABLE WORKER on Feb. 17, 2009 at 10:35 p.m. — Company laying off employees and giving overtime to other workers is more of a losing battle either way you look at it! Employees were told if they were called back by March 2nd, they would have a job, if not, they no longer had a job! Cut out overtime and put people back to work, not only are you hurting your employees but the city of Geneva as well. Loss of income is a loss of sales for the city. Not many jobs in the city makes people seek new jobs elsewhere. Makes you think we should have voted wet on the wet dry ballot. That would have been a lot of tax money for the city, which is now being lost by loss of jobs!

What these commenters reveal is the same Reaganomics corporate approach at work as with Pilgrim’s Pride, only scaled down in size. Everywhere it’s the same: the company only exists as a vehicle for the top half a dozen or so executives and major shareholders to plunder as many suckers — workers, investors, taxpayers — as they can soak. We know a lot less about Kelley Foods, the last place McLendon worked before his killing spree. Divorce papers from 2003 reveal that the wife of Charles Kelley, one of the principal owners, accused him of having “engaged in domestic violence” against her.

Watch Bo Pilgrim’s insane vanity video

We also know that, like Pilgrim’s Pride, Kelley Foods earns a substantial amount of money from American taxpayers: $1.36 million in food contracts with the Defense Department in just three years, 2005-07. For Kelley, that’s a huge amount.

So now we can go back to the question of motive, a question that Alabama investigators are running away from: rapacious corporations that cheat their workers and plunder the company wealth, a systematic bullying that extends all the way down to the way workers treat each other, and the sadism in the way they treat the chickens. It’s a snapshot of a vicious law-of-the-jungle world, and yet it’s just plain flat reality for most Americans.

Put in this context, McLendon seems a lot less like a maniac, and more like a victim of maniacs, who finally snapped and lashed out — killing many of the “wrong” people, although judging by his list and what authorities had said earlier, he had plans to kill the right people, too.

But this isn’t something Alabama authorities would want to expose: It would pissing off a serious company which is in the middle of choosing which plants to close, and it would mean creating some very confusing and potentially dangerous sympathy for McLendon.

While much of the massacre details are a repeat of similar “going postal” attacks over the past 20 years, the way he killed his mother and family suggests that a new pattern is emerging to go with the Great Depression 2: Now, killers take their families down with them.

In today’s rampage, the shooter began by killing his mother and torching her home, then driving to where other family members lived and killing them, before ending it all at his former employer Reliable Metals. This sequence strongly resembles a couple of other recent high-profile family slayings: one in Los Angeles, which left seven family members dead in January, and another in Ohio a few weeks later, leaving three dead. In those killings, the shooter and his family were left financially devastated by the Great Depression 2.

It’s interesting that McLendon began his attack by taking out his family, but ended it attacking the source of the pain — inside the company premises, where he ended his life. McLendon’s family murders were a bit more complicated than those in Ohio and Los Angeles, however: It appears that he was very careful and respectful with the bodies of his mother and four dogs after he killed them, placing the dogs at his mother’s head and feet the way ancient civilizations buried their leaders, before setting their bodies on fire as if in a funeral pyre — as if he loved her too much to have her endure not only the aftermath of his planned attack, but a world in which she was constantly being crushed by a vampiric corporation, and a culture that nurtured such corporations.

On the other hand, he seems to have had genuine scores to settle with other family members across town, whom he shot on their porch — reports coming out indicate that a nasty divorce some years earlier had led to deepening disputes with this side of McLendon’s family, suggesting that unlike his mother, they were killed for retribution.

For years, these shootings were considered “random acts” committed by people who “snapped for no reason.” Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They’re reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to “snap” and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone’s wealth.

Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there’s a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats’ legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share.

Watch PETA’s undercover video inside Pilgrim’s Pride

LATE NOTE: Reader Doug sent a letter pointing out that Abu Ghraib model/scapegoat Lynndie England worked briefly at the Pilgrim’s Pride plant in West Virginia but quit because she was too horrified by what she saw. According to the American Prospect:

England noticed that unhealthy-looking chicken parts were being sent down the line. She told her supervisors, but they ignored her. Her sister recalls her walking over to her station and taking off her smock.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?'” Klinestiver says. “‘We’ve only been at work for an hour.’ She said, ‘I quit,’ and walked out the door.”

“I didn’t like the way management was doing things,” England explains. “People would take the good chicken off and put the bad chicken on. Management didn’t care.”

I wouldn’t worry. Every corporation in America is ruined now. Soon they will have new, more sober, more Chinese owners and managers who will set things straight and bring back a team culture.

6. Joe Blow | March 13th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

How about a bit of a social contract?

Not a rape and grind to dust game-plan…

My company is great. Treats us like people, expects us to work hard when needed, understands if people can get some time to goof off and take it.

great pay, vacation, health coverage

naturally, its a european owned company…

7. Jason Wolfe | March 13th, 2009 at 12:37 pm

@Gooftrop

Please explain how ranting against the plutocracy that has destroyed our economy is ranting against America? These guys are at best .01% of America are systematically destroying America. See AIG Behr Lehman Rest of Corporate America Et Al. I think “America” is better represented by the other 99% of the country that suffers from these policies. The alternative is higher capital gains rights, stronger workplace protection laws, stronger union laws, and larger government employment as a bulwark against the 7 year business cycle.

8. wengler | March 13th, 2009 at 12:49 pm

The most disappointing part of this is the coverup after the deaths. Maybe if they take that tax money out of the local sheriff’s department they will do the job that the state investigators refused to do and offer a full explanation.

I’ve seen this crap first hand when I worked retail. The management will do anything they can to screw you out of a little more money. They seek to create an environment where the some of the worst paid workers are doing at least a half-hour a day off the clock, whether cutting from breaks or adding more off time to lunch. There is little to no recourse because you have no union rep. and your only choice is to go talk to the manager that is purposefully screwing you.

I’m guessing the massacre to suicide rate because of workplace stress is still probably about 1 to 1000. There can be and will be many more of these as the economy tanks.

9. Jasen Comstock | March 13th, 2009 at 12:51 pm

Glenn Beck thinks your boy in Alabama shot the place up because he was forced to be politically correct.

@6. That used to be America too. People around here seem to somehow tie Reagan’s half-assed ideas to business and capitalist work ethic. Just because you attack Reaganomics doesn’t mean that you’re supporting laziness and bloated inefficiency.

The labor-capital pact that existed from about the end of WW2 until Nixon was fine, everyone was better off. Everything about neoliberalism is about the short-term, from the micro to the macro level. Fine if you want to collapse spectacularly like other greedy civilizations from the past. But maybe that’s not what America should be shooting for. Conservatives love the Greatest Generation, and the social prosperity of the decades after the Second World War, but they refuse to live in that economic reality.

It’s like they’re motivated by selfish, Randist greed.

11. DocAmazing | March 13th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

Has Jenny Yang, an attorney with the Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll law firm, the lead lawyer on the Pilgrim’s Pride case been made aware of all of this? Seems pretty relevant to me!

12. Tommacko | March 13th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

Fantastic article, Mark.

13. jim | March 13th, 2009 at 3:18 pm

It will be a great day when Americans finally rise up and gut these pigs.

14. Realist | March 13th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

Great articla! Thank you Ames.

@ Jason:

You probably mean well. Up to the point of promoting government employment as a measure to ease the business cycle.

The last three decades brought an unprecedented growth of government in the United States as well as Europe. As government employment is (with exceptions) unproductive and intrusive on everybody else, a large, draining government on top of a mountain of debt deepens the impact of a recession and delays the recovery. The quasi-governmental FED operation is actually the root cause of the current depression. As is the political opposition to letting Wall Street fail.

The regulatory onslaugt of the previous years has actually accelerated the corporate looting, as the formulation and selective enforcement of regulation deepens the chasm between the political darlings and everybody else. Take a good look at the relationship between big pharma and the FDA, or how the SEC gave its thumbs up while refusing to investigate Madoff for years.

Government wont help.

As for the resurrection of the social contract, forget it. I (born 82) expect nothing from and wont cry a singe tear for the failed babyboomer generation.

15. Johnny Rico | March 13th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

Yeah, right. Tin foil hats, everyone.

He was a psycho with a gun. It happens. Get over it. Put down the Noam Chomsky.

16. Johnny Rico | March 13th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

“One major difference between the Europe’s and America’s school shootings is that they happen all the time in America, with a frightening regularity, whereas they’re still incredibly rare in Europe — two school massacres in Finland and two in Germany, all of them unusually bloody by American standards, but none of them appear to have sparked an unstoppable trend in Europe’s schools.”

That’s because right now, historically, Europe and America are still two very different places. 50 years from now, we will be more similar and the trends will be similar. Or whatever.

I’m more the type who prefers it when a journalist doesn’t challenge me the way this article challenges me. If I’m challenged, it requires some more thinking on my part. My fetal-alcohol-syndrome damaged brain just can’t cope. Sorry.

17. Johnny Rico | March 13th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

…and then on the flip side…

“McLendon’s killings holds few similarities to that other massacre that transpired this week in a school in Stuttgart, Germany.”

Oh, really? A fucking psycho shoots a bunch of people. I’m not sure you could get more similar. Again, it’s probably my fetal-alcohol-syndrome acting up, but how can someone actually look at things in a more complex manner than I do? I see two shootings and I say “exact same.” Take for example war. Nazi Germany invades Poland even though Poland doesn’t threaten Germany; America invades Iraq even though America’s not threatened. As I’ve always argued on every internet forum, you could not get more similar than these two situations. America is Nazi Germany. It’s as simple as that.

18. Johnny Rico | March 13th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

“Germany’s is different from ours on so many levels.

For one thing, Germany is much more humane to its citizens than America is: its teachers are much more respected than in America, where “people who can’t do teach,” while all citizens have free health care and certain employee rights — like, for example, mandatory paid vacation time (America is the only Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country not to mandate paid vacation time to workers).”

Here’s the thing: I don’t want free health care or vacation time. What I want is freedom–the freedom to be a sucker, the freedom to get fired and the freedom to go on internet forums defending billionaires who treat me like shit. I wonder, does fetal alcohol syndrome make you prone to masochism? Or did God make me this way?

Just for the record, deregulation started under Carter not Reagan. The sell out of US industry to foreign competitors, so the US could concentrate on the military, started with Kennedy (when Robert McNamara left Ford for The Pentagon).

“because mommy and daddy are themselves being crushed at the workplace ”

Eric Harris’ mother was a housewife. His father had was an airforce bureaucrat. They were not being crushed at work.

Both of Klebolds parents worked, but it is not clear they were being crushed as you say.

23. j-dawg | March 13th, 2009 at 8:12 pm

‘Cmon guys! Europe being pristine and HENCE IRRELEVANT, has been a theme here at the exile for years.

24. firewalkwithme | March 13th, 2009 at 8:32 pm

@14. I can’t let you get away with this. Please pick up an intro micro or macro econ textbook and honestly read it. After absorbing what’s in there, please come back here and explain what your plans are to solve the tragedy of the commons and to provide necessary public goods without “Big Government”. I lean Libertarian, so I understand and appreciate your points. We must oppose greed and malfeasance wherever it appears, but we shouldn’t cut off our nose to spite our face.

25. DisappointedReader | March 13th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

Jesus christ, this is the scariest thing Mark has ever written.

Let me start off by disclosing my own bias: I’m admittedly a huge fan of Ayn Rand, though I hide that these days and call myself a Libertarian instead. Also, since this article really bothered the hell out of me, I’m going to pretend that I usually like The eXile’s stuff but now I’m down on them–that will give my criticism the appearance of something valid. Okay, ready?

Usually The Exiled has always been somewhat right, somewhat wrong, but lately it’s like everything has been thrown out the window except for an abiding hatred of capitalism and a deep-seated desire to flee home to pseudo-socialism. Not that I’ve seen the pseudo-socialism anywhere, but I just feel it, you know? And not that there isn’t every reason in the world to hate capitalism these days, since any sane person would, but still…you know?

First, it’s incredibly simplistic to ascribe the same damn motives to every last fucking shooting spree that happens. I’m not sure that every shooting spree is ascribed to one motive, in fact in this article Ames distinguishes the spree in Germany from the one in Alabama, but still, I’ll just say that he ascribes the same damn motive to every spree and hope I get away with it. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s the product of my intellectual failure, or cognitive blinders-“See the whole world through the lens of Atlas Shrugged” on my part. Newsflash: Alan Greenspan admitted he was wrong. Oops!

Trying to draw up links based on the purported nickname of a guy from 20 years ago goes beyond tenuous and into the realm of something I can’t handle.

What’s really telling though is the vitriole aimed towards the CEO for making $3.2 and $2.1 million dollars. Take note: if you ever aspire to earn a salary greater than that, you’ve become one of The Enemy, and shall be thrown to the wolves. Anyone who so much as slept through a single business course would roll on the floor laughing at the idea that a $3M salary for a CEO of a company employing 56,000 people is overpaid. In Mark’s world, if you spend 63 years successfully building up your own business, you still haven’t “earned” the right to make “that much money”.

I hurt myself laughing too hard at the idea that a $1.36 million dollar government contract is “huge money”. $1.36 million probably doesn’t cover the government’s daily allocation of fucking toilet paper. It may seem like a lot of money to an out-of-work demagogue, but all Mark is doing is making himself sound increasingly distant from reality.

I’m not even going to go into the idea that shooting family members is somehow a means of “striking back” against “big corporations”. Generally when people snap out of rage, and actually go after their bosses, they, y’know, actually *GO AFTER* their bosses. Not that I’d know because I’m the type who sucks up to rich people. The whole article is a fucking joke.

Just shut the hell up about this retarded bullshit, and start running some of Megan McArdle’s stories. We need reasoned, witty cynicism, not desperate class-warfare screeds.

26. Kotek Besar | March 14th, 2009 at 12:07 am

This is the most depressing article I’ve read in a while. Good job (no sarcasm intended).

27. Anonymous | March 14th, 2009 at 12:07 am

“The difference between a common maniac’s murder spree and crimes that result from intolerable conditions and injustices is that the maniac’s killings take place in a kind of vacuum, resulting in shock but not widespread sympathy and an unstoppable ongoing movement. In that sense, the two school shootings in Finland and the two in Germany don’t seem to be anything like what we have here.”

Ames,

What you are writing here is just plain wrong, and goes to show how little research you have done about schools in Europe. It is no surprise to me that Finland, which has the most achievement oriented, “American Style” school system among the Nordic countries, has been the only country in the region thus far to have experienced school massacres.

28. gordonsson | March 14th, 2009 at 12:14 am

Irrelevance is a geo-strategic advantage. Out here in the Southern Ocean it’s our main defense. Unless dairy cattle become strategically important, that is.

29. TonyS | March 14th, 2009 at 4:09 am

That is the reason why class-analysis is so dangerous (to some): McLendon might have gone and killed those who are responsible for his misery (and profit from it)…

30. Oelsen | March 14th, 2009 at 7:18 am

Risking cencorship: The first half is perfect written, well arguemented and well researched. But you are wrong on the second half.

Don’t you wonder why its happening in Germany, USA and Finland? They happen to have one thing in common: Depressing circumstances. France e.g. has much more muslims and troubles, but noone does a suicide mission.

America and Europe are both evangelical/protestant/reformed and this spirit of “life-conduct” is a hidden pressure, depressing feelings and free thought in the background. Additionally, the German maniac, as you describe him, was bullied too: Envy made the poorer pupils tease him because of his wealth (widespread theory around here in Switzerland about this). And after he dropped out of School he had to revenge this unacceptedness, just like in Colombine, Alabama, Virginia Tech, if all those narrative behind the story are right.

Germany has this disgusting INSM (Institute for a new Social Market Economy; Institut für eine neues soziale Marktwirtschaft) sponsored by big publishing/media and its plan is to destroy your described difference between the states and Germany and this abhorrible goo spills over to Switzerland, Austria, Poland, France! I really fear they deconstruct all our liberties, freedoms and rights as workers and humans. Even family, classic familiy values are under attack: in its core a good idea ripping kids much more early out of the family “für die Freiheit der Frau” (meaning another victim for the machine). And THIS produces funny consequences in 20 years, I guarantee.

I concede a difference of magnitude, a huge difference between America and Europe, though. But thanks to the “financial crisis” we export all bad stuff to every country of this world and all citizens will, erm, benefit from it. Each of its own will have ugly things to cope with.

31. Anonymous | March 14th, 2009 at 8:06 am

I wouldn’t dismiss the German school shooting so casually. Certainly, they are more rare in Europe, and you can make a pretty strong case that it is due to citizens being treated more humanely. However, it’s completely possible that a large degree of bullying, akin to what happens in a lot of US high schools, happened in Winnenden.

Even in the article you linked people are blaming the usual scapegoat of violent videogames, and it seems to me like the entire situation is similar.

32. Viking | March 14th, 2009 at 11:30 am

The workplace culture in the United States is humiliating, employees are underpaid and frequntly have The Human Relations “hey we’re all a team here right folks! BTW you’re job is going to mexico in two months. Go team!”

We’re going to see more of this if the crises doesn’t abate.

33. Viking | March 14th, 2009 at 11:32 am

Please forgive the “ÿou’re” for “ÿour” and frequntly

34. Alexey Bogatiryov | March 14th, 2009 at 1:16 pm

Another fine piece of journalism Mark! Thanks for helping me make sense of this insane world. Do you think there is a chance of a reveral of Reaganomics under Obama?

35. David H. | March 14th, 2009 at 2:50 pm

Those of you coming down hard on Mr. Ames may want to read his enlightening book before dismissing his argument. The workers have been crushed since Reagan destroyed PATCO and made it clear that the common worker is not only not valued but despised by his class “betters.” The government has worked very skillfully to set worker against worker in both the US and Europe and when economic times get tough one of many expressions resulting are bloodbaths like these. It’s common sense if nothing else.

As for the Ayn Rand worshippers, come back here in 10-15 years when you’ve grown up and joined society proper. Her laughable “philosophy” is of comic book sensibility at best, designed to ensnare the annoying middle-class American who fancies himself a creative entrepreneur but has yet to experience the real world.

Keep up the great work, Mr. Ames.

36. Allen | March 14th, 2009 at 6:47 pm

As soon as somebody brings up “Capitalism”, as most of the critics tend to do, I kind of tune out. They don’t mean a system where people can own private property and buy the labor time of others … which covers places in the world.

They mean something vague and elusive, which they don’t want to articulate. They mean the absolute lack of responsibility to others and the absolute moral right to fuck other people over if it can get you personally ahead in any way.

This version of “Capitalism” isn’t a political or economic system; it’s a psychological disposition. But they want to sell it to you as like an anthropomorphism — a stern but benevolent uncle everybody loves … total bullshit.

By “Capitalism”, they actually mean -> “Fuck you”.

37. Greg Foreman | March 14th, 2009 at 7:40 pm

Capitalism is a useless term these days. There isn’t a significant nation in the world that has totally embraced free markets regardless of the propaganda from the left. Varying degrees of market regulation are the norm.

While it may be true that the United States has the least amount of market regulation of any first or second world country it is far from being a capitalist economy. Ask anyone who has ever started a business how much regulation they encounter in a given year.

Railing against the filthy capitalists makes about as much sense as complaining about crime and serial killers. The proper term for the movers and shakers in American business is capitalist, though if I’m going to be the pedant blowhard that I am, I’ll use the term “mercantilist” and hope that you’ll be impressed. They seek to privatize their profits and nationalize their failures. They seek the protection of government and use their influence in that government to create regulations that benefit their goals and impede their competitors.

If the American economy were truly a free market the bailout would not have happened. The bankers would be bankrupt and their customers would be able to sue them to recover their losses. But since America has a mercantilism economy the profits are kept and the losses are nationalized.

38. j-dawg | March 14th, 2009 at 8:26 pm

the eXile is clearly encouraging Americans to stand up for themselves …. no more false class consciousness.

39. CSI | March 14th, 2009 at 9:06 pm

There’s a reason that animal abuse is listed as one of the big red flags for future serial killers.

40. DisappointedReader | March 14th, 2009 at 11:15 pm

I dare just one supporter, one fan of Ames article, to tell me just what exactly a “fair” salary would be for a CEO of a corporation like Pilgrim’s Pride.

C’mon, find your balls and give a number.

41. nil | March 14th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

ames perceives the excess of our wonderful system in a conspiratorial way because he was in russia during the bush administration. if he’d been here instead, he’d understand just how banal the evil really is. thank god he wasn’t, because then he’d be in the grave with a self-inflicted gunshot wound and all us cowards would have nothing interesting to read.

42. sansculotte | March 15th, 2009 at 8:57 am

Eat the rich, not animals.

43. Greg Foreman | March 15th, 2009 at 9:19 am

Why do I keep posting and posting and posting comments? Someone?

44. Rick Riley | March 15th, 2009 at 9:28 am

The Exiled has become just another left wing lame-ass web-site. Whereas I’m still the type who is neither left nor right, or I’m the type who calls himself a libertarian. Basically I do nothing but stake out positions that make me look cool.

45. DocAmazing | March 15th, 2009 at 10:17 am

Disappointed Reader:

First, a fair salary would be set by the Board of Directors, not the man himself. Second, if his salary was increasing while business was so very bad that production workers were being forced to work off-the-clock, his salary cannot be said to be fair–he’s gouging while his company is failing. Hardly an example of personal responsibility, wouldn’t you agree?

I know you have accepted that your employer’s droppings make a nutritious and tasty meal, but please do not expect the rest of us to buy that cookbook.

46. Allen | March 15th, 2009 at 10:46 am

Foreman: I agree with you.

But you attack the vaguely defined “left”; in reality the “left” hardly uses the term “Capitalism”. Only the Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand fan boys do.

But no one knows what it means. “Capitalist” was jargon popularized first by Karl Marx and Proudhon to describe a system where people own things for a living and can buy the labor time of others … almost everywhere in the world this is still the primary way of running the economy.

If they mean a place free of all government regulation and where there are no taxes (essentially where there is no government at all), well no such place exists — except maybe in Somalia.

In my own personal opinion mass market economics and the state are inseparable; there’s a reason that capitalism and the nation state essentially grew up together.

47. SameFag | March 15th, 2009 at 12:03 pm

According to a major study on school shooters:

School shootings typically are perpetrated by people with a) access to firearms b) some major failure in life after which redemption appears hopeless.

They’re like viking berzerkers, the shame is so great that it can only be cleansed with blood, of the enemy, and of the shamed.

Although commonly used in a colloquial and less-violent sense, the phrase is particularly associated with a specific sociopathic culture-bound syndrome in Malaysian culture. In a typical case of running amok, a male who has shown no previous sign of anger or any inclination to violence will acquire a weapon and, in a sudden frenzy, will attempt to kill or seriously injure anyone he encounters. Amok episodes of this kind normally end with the attacker being killed by bystanders, or committing suicide.

The explanation which is now most widely accepted is that amok is closely related to male honor (amok by women is virtually unknown). In many cases where the background of the amok-runner is known, there seems to have been some element of deep shame which prevented the man from living honorably, as he saw it, in his own society. Running amok was both a way of escaping the world (since perpetrators were normally killed) and re-establishing one’s reputation as a man to be feared and respected. Some observers have related this explanation to Islam’s ban on suicide, which, it is suggested, drove Malay men to create circumstances in which others would kill them. Evidence for this explanation is that the incidence of amok seems to be less where amok runners are captured and tried, rather than being beaten to death on the spot.

48. Greg Foreman | March 15th, 2009 at 1:57 pm

I’d reply to you Allen, but it seems my fetal-alcohol syndrome is not well tolerated here on Exiled. Time to move along and let the people with well-developed brains have their philosophical circle jerk.

You still didn’t answer the question, though: what would “fair” compensation be? And what if he is the owner of the company, and there is no wonderfully committee-esque Board of Directors? It’s his property, the fruit of HIS labors, so why does he not have the right to his own work?

It’s easy to call people names when your own political philosophy is about as sophisticated and well-reasoned as a McDonalds Happy Meal…easy, because that’s all you really know how to do.

50. Magni | March 15th, 2009 at 10:51 pm

DisappointedReader: why pay them at all? A fair salary for the CEO of Pilgrim’s Pride is a bullet to the head. I’d have thought this would go down well with conservative bible bashing sorts as they know very well what the wages of sin are.

51. momu | March 16th, 2009 at 1:51 am

okay, but what about slaughtered babies? if he had personal/professional/whatever reasons for killing – I can understand it, but BABIES? even your great article can’t explain it.

52. DocAmazing | March 16th, 2009 at 7:43 am

DisappointedReader–

Aaaand his perqs went up, as did his bonuses. Keep reading. Sound out the words, if you need to.

As he is not plucking any chickens, I think we can safely say that the company’s profits are nto the fruit of Pilgrim’s labor, but of the labor of a whole bunch of people. How ’bout making his salary 2000% that of the lowest-paid worker there? Then he gets to be king of the hill, and the money stays in the company instead of being used to pay for arm-candy hookers as seen above.

53. j-dog | March 16th, 2009 at 1:28 pm

@momu

You retard! The article explains is perfectly …. you just need to stop reading so literally and look for THEMES. Jesus.

54. Gooftroop | March 16th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

Europe is falling apart. Take a walk through downtown Malmo or Oslo. Shitholes. France? are you kidding me? The suburbs are off limits to white people, thousands of old people die when the weather gets warm, and no young people can get jobs. The birth/death rate is ridiculous, too. Europe is fading into irrelevancy, whether you like it or not. Why do you think there is this push towards more right wingers these days? The policies are unsustainable. they are moving away from socialism, if anything. america couldnt afford to have europes policies because we had so many immigrants. now europe is experienceing immigration flows that the US experienced in the first half of the century, and shit is starting to collapse. you know I’m right. Germany’s the only one that kind of has it’s shit together.

55. aleke | March 16th, 2009 at 2:52 pm

Let me put the position of DisappointedReader more clearly for those that are having a hard time understanding.

“ Hey! I’m an idiot! Pay the rich people that already had money and murky connections to raise capital to start a horrible, predatory business anytime they want! Buy the politicians and regulators! It’s their money. They deserve it goddammit. “

56. Robert | March 16th, 2009 at 5:13 pm

What was interesting in the comments is what is a fair wage for corporate executives, Easy a clearly defined multiple of the minimum wage paid at the company. Something the clearly defines the additional responsibility, skill set and, the greater impact they have on company profitability, let’s say 10 times and beyond that, if the company is in a position to pay more, it can pay all of it’s workers more. Now when it comes to bonuses, well management has a responsibility to ensure the decision benefit the company over the long term, not just the current bonus, bleed the company dry cycle, so bonuses calculation should be done over the following decade and paid upon that basis. Of course as for current management, that hoard of psychopaths, seriously prison is the safest place for us keep them. Beware on forums, by far the bulk of right wing posts, are paid to post market droids, seriously what low IQ permanent minimum wage drone has the education, time or money (when sober) to read and posts on web sites. The professional liars are every where monitoring sites and trying to get first post.

57. j-dog | March 16th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

am I the only person who checks this website about 20 times a day looking for updates and comments??

58. Tom Owens | March 16th, 2009 at 10:18 pm

Dead nutz, right on. Kill or be killed is where this is headed. The function of the leader is to be ruthless, by designating those to be sacrificed…

59. DisappointedReader | March 17th, 2009 at 9:53 pm

Communism didn’t work out so well in eastern Europe, and yet people are hell-bent on seeing it brought back to life again in America, like a bad zombie film.

The only real comfort to be had is the fact that most of you idiots never will gain the motivation or resources to leave your mother’s basement.

60. Commie | March 18th, 2009 at 12:43 am

@Gooftroop

I’ll take France any time before a trailer park filled with white people anywhere in the US.

61. Commie | March 18th, 2009 at 12:50 am

@DisappointedReader

The idiots in Eastern Europe THOUGHT that Communism didn’t work out well. For reasons such as: only 10 kinds of sausage were sold in a store in East Berlin versus 50 kinds in West Berlin. You’ll now see them change their minds as their countries slide into bankruptcy one by one…

62. DisappointedReader | March 18th, 2009 at 1:09 am

EVERY MORNING I OPEN PALM-SLAP MY AYN RAND ANTHOLOGY IN DISBELIEF BECAUSE I LOVE IT SO MUCH. GOD BLESS GOD. FUCK CUMMUNIZM, I SUPPORTED BUSH UNTIL LIKE 2007

63. fajensen | March 18th, 2009 at 7:26 am

Here’s the thing: I don’t want free health care or vacation time. What I want is freedom–the freedom to be a sucker,

And you (‘mericans) clearly are just that:

Instead of wasting your life on work You could be off using your four-to-six weeks of paid vacation to travel somewhere cheap, get seriously shit-faced, fall over during some especially stupid drunken stunt AND not have to pay the hospital for putting you back together again – ready for next years holiday.

And your employer cannot sack you for being off sick …

64. Jack Boot | March 18th, 2009 at 11:36 am

A century ago, Lloyd George described Czarist Russia as a tyranny moderated by assassination. Perhaps America, too, is showing signs of moderation…

65. ZedMan2K | March 18th, 2009 at 11:02 pm

Ok, I need to do a little rant here. From what I have read most of the people posting here have a job, a good job. I don’t see too many people who have worked for a company that saw other workers laid off and then a “big contract” came in and now you need to work 2X as hard and fast to make up for the lost workers (with no incentives). I see “DisappointedReader” post #25, state, “Anyone who so much as slept through a single business course would roll on the floor laughing at the idea that a $3M salary for a CEO of a company employing 56,000 people is overpaid” Your right, the only course that I could find (business for the people who only watch ‘FOX’) stated that you take as much as you can even if the work modal you have means the 56K people working are just cows or “chickens” if you will, and just run it into the ground and let the tax payers pay for your mess because you have 56,000 employees. Yet this is the problem today, 56K employee’s means that you have something that the government needs to look at, after all its tax money, people employed and tax power on the government. I worked many hours with out pay when my business was in trouble, as the owner of the Co., I didn’t make money when my Co. did not make money but I made sure that the people that worked for me was paid. Today if you are a big biz. and you don’t make money, the Gov. will help you. If you get big enough you can do what ever you want to do and as a CEO, CFO, CIO or any top official, even if you are losing huge $ you do not need to worry, at worst if Co. goes under and the Gov. will help you, if not you have you nice severance package. @DisappointedReader post #40 “I dare just one supporter, one fan of Ames article, to tell me just what exactly a “fair” salary would be for a CEO of a corporation like Pilgrim’s Pride. C’mon, find your balls and give a number.” A “fair” salary would and only be a % of the Co.’s profits, like I stated a CEO is like “the owner” of the Co. has 2 employees or 100,000, why does the rules change? Why if Pilgrim’s Pride was run into the ground should the “Owner” or “CEO” make money?.. Let me know as my business went broke and I want to know why my bottom line is not in the black.!.

66. Rocko | March 20th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

To the idiots defending capitalism because free markets don’t exist, do everyone a favor and drop Hayek’s, Friedman’s et al apologias for their privileged class for a second and read up on Karl Polanyi. “Free market” is a retarded romantic myth and a fruit of the imperialist thinking of its time, up there with “white man’s burden”.

It’s not that a real free market hasn’t existed yet, it’s that such a thing as you frame it is impossible, as an economy is inextricable from a society, its values and its power dynamics. You don’t get to redefine the terms just for the sake of your pet ideology. What is passes around for capitalism is by sheer definition capitalism itself, your armchair interpretation be damned.

Bitching and moaning that capitalism is just fine and dandy and that all the shit it creates is because it has never been properly applied is a ridiculous sophistry that runs contrary to all historical and philosophical analyses. It’s a bullshit excuse that communists have been throwing around for ages and it doesn’t fly for them either.

67. H.D. Price | March 23rd, 2009 at 7:14 pm

“What’s wrong with me?”

You’re a right wing moron. That answer you’re question?

I see the Freepers jackasses come here, which means Ames is hitting the nail on the head. This is article is excellent and to the point.

As far as being “irrelevent”, the U.S. has been irrelevent for decades. It’s a pimped out whore for uber-capitalists and zionists whose M.O. is to kill and destroy anyone or anything that stands in the way of their hegemony over those who oppose them. These idiots on here defending “captialism” (the screwing of the poor by the rich) and using wikipedia as a tool to support their asinine arguments and denial of reality is pathetic. Kennedy started shipping jobs overseas? Yeah, right. Kennedy was killed because he opposed assholes like Bo Pilgrim (and Clint Murchison and the war machine).

68. ben | April 14th, 2009 at 6:59 pm

great article but be careful citing PETA, they’re not exactly trustworthy.

69. Melissa | October 29th, 2009 at 11:05 am

I think this opinion piece stretches it a bit too far, especially considering there isn’t much of a case for Reliance Steel or Kelley Foods being much like Pilgrim’s Pride at all… Layoffs as a sign of capitalism’s evils? Job markets change, and they have to be able to change! France’s unemployment rate is traditionally much higher than ours because it’s very hard to fire people there, so company’s avoid hiring unless they absolutely have to.

Pilgrim’s Pride sounds absolutely horrendous, but this shooting sounds like a case of suicidal depression leading to a completely irrational victim complex. Suicidal Depression is not a rational state, people – it’s a mental disorder. We can’t look at his actions while obviously in the grip of a mental disorder and draw logical conclusions from it.

70. Ro | June 20th, 2011 at 7:30 pm

According to Wikipedia, “In 1986, Bingham family patriarch Barry Bingham Sr. announced the family would sell all their media holdings including Standard Gravure. The employees of Standard Gravure made a bid to buy the company, but it was sold instead to Michael Shea from Atlanta, Georgia for $22 million. After the sale the employees learned that $11 million of their employee pension fund had been used to help finance Shea’s purchase.”

Fairly insightful post. Never believed that it was this simple after all. I had spent a good deal of my time looking for someone to explain this subject clearly and you’re the only 1 that ever did that. Kudos to you! Keep it up

73. bitchybitch | May 6th, 2012 at 11:26 am

well, at least this time you’re excusing a killer who killed people he actually had beef with and not random strangers.

Ames, if being a creep who can’t get laid or hold a job is justification for mass murder, how do you explain all the people who lose their jobs or girlfriends and DON’T become mass murderers? I’m just dying to see what kind of bullshit spin you can put on that, you shallow fucking hack.

74. Luazi | March 26th, 2015 at 1:45 am

This is a brilliant and insightful article. Thank you.

I do need to ask though, why are people attacking each other? If you feel that the article is opinionated, is it not possible to state that respectfully without the insults? I gather that all of you are pretty clued up on the workings of america, but adding a vulgar term doesn’t make your point clearer.

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The political establishment’s racist, authoritarian reaction to the 1992 LA riots—blaming broken black families, massing cops and troops, and Ron Paul’s advice to his family on how to kill black “animals” and get away with it…